Computers are becoming increasingly more powerful while at the same time becoming less costly. This has resulted in the increased presence of computers into many homes and business throughout the world. Along with this increase in computing performance and popularity has also come an increase in the number of areas in which computers are used. Where once computers were used primarily for productivity-based applications (e.g., databases, word processing, spreadsheets, and so forth), a wide range of entertainment applications have become increasingly popular.
One such entertainment application is that of media content playback, such as audio (e.g., songs) and audio/video (e.g., movies) playback. For example, computers are often equipped with a CDROM drive that allows the computer to read an audio CD and play the songs on the CD via one or more speakers coupled to the computer. An additional feature that such an entertainment application may provide is the ability to obtain information about a CD (e.g., track names and artist name(s)). This information is commonly referred to as “meta data” corresponding to the CD. The application accesses a database of meta data (e.g., from a remote server) to identify information about the CD (e.g., track names and artist name(s)), and then displays this information to the user.
In addition to playing back media content directly from the source CD, some applications also allow songs to be copied from the source CD and stored as separate files on a local hard drive of the computer, such as in an MP3 or WMA format. This process is commonly referred to as “ripping”. These locally stored files can then be played back at a subsequent time directly from the local hard drive without the presence of the source CD in the CDROM drive.
One current problem with these systems, however, is that meta data is typically associated with only one source (e.g., the source CD). Thus, if the user plays back a song directly from a CD, then the meta data corresponding to that CD is displayed to the user. Similarly, if the user rips that same song to a file on the local hard drive and plays that song back from the file on the hard drive, then the meta data corresponding to that file is displayed to the user. However, any changes made (e.g., by the user) to the meta data corresponding to the CD are displayed to the user only when the song is played back directly from the CD, and any changes made to the meta data corresponding to the file are displayed to the user only when the song is played back from the file. Thus, multiple different sets of meta data are created (one for each source) for each song, requiring any changes to the meta data for a song to be made to each of the multiple sets. This creates an inconsistent and unfriendly user experience.
The invention addresses these problems and provides solutions to improve meta data management for media content objects.